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2004-08-13 Enormous OEM demand ate our X800s

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2004-05-04 ATI Radeon X800New high end graphics chip succeeding the R350/R360 based on a completely new design also known as project Loki. Was to be shown at Comdex in November-03, but was only shown to NDA-signing people on CeBIT-04 and launched to the rest of us in May. Was earlier said to support unified DX 9.0c and Pixel and Vertex Shaders 3.0, but only DirectX 9.0b is supported.
The R420 is a simplified version of the R400 (now R500) to get a new high-end chip out quicker. R420 still uses 24 bit precision (96 bit in total) but adds 3Dc compression.
Native PCI-Express support shows up in the R423 (X800 PCI-E), formely known as X880 on June 1st.
Two versions are launched: The X800 Pro includes 12 pipelines with availability now, while the X800 XT uses 16 and ships on May 21st. A low cost X800 SE with only 8 pipelines is also planned. Previously known as R420.